The use of a print device is lower than that of its host computer.
In the light of such difference in use, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 7-276742 discloses a configuration of connecting a multiple-port printer to multiple host computers and parallel-processing data receive from corresponding ports by corresponding CPUs (central processing units). Alternatively, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-20242 discloses a configuration of parallel-processing the receive data in a time sharing manner by a single CPU.
Yet alternatively, when using a single printer for multiple host computers, a plurality of page descriptive languages are sometimes used. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-92610 discloses a single-port printer supporting multiple languages.
Meanwhile, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 8-305517 discloses a configuration of spool-processing print data of print requests from multiple host computers.
However, a printer disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 8-305517 does not comprise multiple ports and uses only a single network interface. Also, since the printer spool-processes a packet, when receiving jobs that are in sequence, the printer cannot identify them by their job boundaries. Therefore, a printer thereof cannot perform job management such as to change a job execution order by the job.
An object of the present invention is to address the aforementioned issues by providing a multiple-port print device that can manage jobs by the job even when the device comprises parallel-process-enabled multiple communication interfaces.